Michael Lewis: Advice From the 1%: Lever Up, Drop Out

The rabble has been driven from the public parks. Our
adversaries, now defined by the freaks and criminals among them,
have demonstrated only that they have no idea what they are
doing. They have failed to identify a single achievable goal.

Just weeks ago, in our first memo, we expressed concern
that the big Wall Street banks were vulnerable to a mass
financial boycott -- more vulnerable even than tobacco companies
or apartheid-era South African multinationals. A boycott might
raise fears of a bank run; and the fears might create the fact.

Now, we’ll never know: The Lower 99’s notion of an attack
on Wall Street is to stand around hollering at the New York
Stock Exchange. The stock exchange!

We have won a battle, but this war is far from over.

As our chief quant notes, “No matter how well we do for
ourselves, there will always be 99 of them for every one of
us.” Disturbingly, his recent polling data reveal that many of
us don’t even know who we are: Fully half of all Upper Ones
believe themselves to belong to the Lower 99. That any human
being can earn more than 344 grand a year without having the
sense to identify which side in a class war he is on suggests
that we should limit membership to actual rich people. But we
wish to address this issue in a later memo. For now we remain
focused on the problem at hand: How to keep their hands off our
money.

Looming Threats

We have identified two looming threats:

The first is the shifting relationship between ambitious
young people and money. There’s a reason the Lower 99 currently
lack leadership: Anyone with the ability to organize large
numbers of unsuccessful people has been diverted into Wall
Street jobs, mainly in the analyst programs at Morgan Stanley
and Goldman Sachs. Those jobs no longer exist, at least not in
the quantities sufficient to distract an entire generation from
examining the meaning of their lives.

Our Wall Street friends, wounded and weakened, can no
longer pick up the tab for sucking the idealism out of America’s
youth. But if not them, who? We on the committee are resigned to
all elite universities becoming breeding grounds for
insurrection, with the possible exception of Princeton.

The second threat is in the unstable mental pictures used
by Lower 99ers to understand their economic lives. (We have
found that they think in pictures.)

For many years the less viable among us have soothed
themselves with metaphors of growth and abundance: rising tides,
expanding pies, trickling down. A dollar in our pocket they
viewed hopefully, as, perhaps, a few pennies in theirs. They
appear to have switched this out of their minds for a new
picture, of a life raft with shrinking provisions. A dollar in
our pockets they now view as a dollar from theirs. Fearing for
their lives, the Lower 99 will surely become ever more desperate
and troublesome. Complaints from our membership about their
personal behavior are already running at post-French
Revolutionary highs.

We on the strategy committee see these developments as
inexorable historical forces. The Lower 99 is a ticking bomb
that can’t be defused. They may be occasionally distracted by,
say, a winning lottery ticket. (And we have sent out the word to
the hedge fund community to cease their purchases of such
tickets.) They may turn their anger on others -- immigrants for
instance, or the federal government -- and we can encourage them
to do so. They may even be frightened into momentary submission.
(We’re long pepper spray.)

In the End

But in the end we believe that any action we take to
prevent them from growing better organized, and more aware of
our financial status, will only delay the inevitable: the day
when they turn, with far greater effect, on us.

Hence our committee’s conclusion: We must be able to quit
American society altogether, and they must know it. For too long
we have simply accepted the idea that we and they are all in
something together, subject to the same laws and rituals and
cares and concerns. This state of social relations between rich
and poor isn’t merely unnatural and unsustainable, but, in its
way, shameful. (Who among us could hold his head high in the
presence of Louis XIV or those Russian czars or, for that
matter, Croesus?)

The modern Greeks offer the example in the world today that
is, the committee has determined, best in class. Ordinary Greeks
seldom harass their rich, for the simple reason that they have
no idea where to find them. To a member of the Greek Lower 99 a
Greek Upper One is as good as invisible.

He pays no taxes, lives no place and bears no relationship
to his fellow citizens. As the public expects nothing of him, he
always meets, and sometimes even exceeds, their expectations. As
a result, the chief concern of the ordinary Greek about the rich
Greek is that he will cease to pay the occasional visit.

That is the sort of relationship with the Lower 99 we must
cultivate if we are to survive. We must inculcate, in ourselves
as much as in them, the understanding that our relationship to
each other is provisional, almost accidental and their claims on
us nonexistent.

As a first, small step we propose to bestow, annually, an
award to the Upper One who has best exhibited to the wider
population his willingness and ability to have nothing at all to
do with them. As the recipient of the first Incline Award -- so
named for the residents of Incline Village, Nevada, many of whom
have bravely fled California state taxes -- we propose Jeff Bezos.

His private rocket ship may have exploded before it reached
outer space. But before it did, it sent back to Earth the
message we hope to convey:

We’re outta here!

(Michael Lewis, most recently author of “Boomerang:
Travels in the New Third World,” is a columnist for Bloomberg
News. The opinions expressed are his own.)